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Monday, October 5, 2015

Fascinating [French] interview with Nathaniel Rich, ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW, in English

Fascinating [French] interview with Nathaniel Rich, ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW, in English here:

''Paris sur l'avenir'' is the French title which means "Betting on Tomorrow"

Translator of the book is Ms. Camille de Chevigny, [320 pages]

(''Odds Against Tomorrow'')

"Paddling Down Broadway"

BEGINS:

They are called "cli-fi", for "climate fictions", these American novels,and they are becoming more and more numerous, in a world defined now by man made global warming and in these novels in which climate change plays a central role.

Most of these cli fi novels fall under the term of climate fiction, aka cli-fi, even if the future, or the effects of global warming are directly tangible, is less and less distant.

Take ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW , by the American writer Nathaniel Rich, 35 years: it is situated in the very near future, maybe in the next 20 years. Or tomorrow! In the fall of 2012, while he was in the process of putting the final touches to this novel (his first novel to be translated in France), which describes New York devastated by a storm, the author saw the Hurricane Sandy hitting on the East Coast of the United States hard. But if this book is an authentic cli-fi, and it is, it is also a beautiful novel of love, a reflection on American paranoia, perhaps even a specific survival post-apocalypse ....... ''Bets on the future'' could well, also , ... be the biography of a mathematician become expert in predictions of disasters, the neurotic Jewish risk analyst Mitch Zukor, written by a former YALE classmate of fac. It is the voice of celui­ci which is heard in the first chapter, recounting the genesis of a vocation: obsessed by the disaster scenarios, the young Zukor spent his nights to calculate the probabilities of see arise a new black plague, a "volcanic eruption mass" or that to happen a nuclear confrontation with China, and his days at the center of health of students, to worry about the risks of having contracted a deadly disease. The day or an earthquake destroys Seattle, on the west coast, it is not particularly surprised - peut­être even released to see that, as he thinks the worst is always safe - and it can deal with a comrade suffering from a serious heart disease. Worked by the anguish after the fac, Zukor is quickly hired by the company Future World, which serves to ensure the insurers, in allowing them to pawn; the work of the young mathematician is to imagine the worst possible scenarios ( "He was at the vanguard of a new industry - the analysis of the nightmare" ). Soon, following a period of drought, it provides for the possibility that a storm swallow New York ... what is happening. Having survived the deluge, at the side of a colleague, he discovers that he is now held for the greater prophet of his time. It rests for him to decide whether he will thrive on the chaos by continuing to "sloughed off of the fear" to people, or if he will succeed to reinvent itself - and the world, peut­être, with him. What fact of Zukor an expert if gifted in his field is, said the man who employs to Future World, his manner of 'combine technical knowledge and despair staff". Because he manages to make sensitive, in his writing, these characteristics of the character, Nathaniel Rich succeeds marvelously the first part of his book, we dip in this spirit worked continuously by the anguish, but also in this world, if familiar, or the fear of ecological disasters, pandemics and wars won each - without force­ ment the push to act, au­delà predictions.If the result of the novel impressed also, it is first by the force of the descriptions, to begin by that of New York underwater, that Zukor traverses in canoe. They make it extremely close this devastated world. And the last words of the book: "We do not have a lot of time.''Et font résonner plus fort les derniers mots du livre : « Nous n’avons pas énormément de temps. »

Access to the rest of the entire article is protected due to a French PAYWALL: